by Garry Disher
An empty hook. ‘Oh, that? We’re always hanging and rehanging things. I don’t like static decorations, do you? I’m still wondering what to hang there.’
Then they were back on the veranda. ‘What about small items? Jewellery, iPods?’
‘As far as I can tell, nothing was taken,’ Mara Niekirk said.
‘Even so, my officers will need to dust for prints.’
The last straw for Warren Niekirk. ‘Is that really necessary? Whoever it was would have worn gloves, and they were disturbed before they could take anything.’
Ignoring him, Challis said, ‘The back door is down this way, I believe?’
He led the way around the veranda, glancing at windows and doors, glancing up, leaving eddies of frustration in his wake. Reaching the alarm box, he asked, ‘Does this bench belong here?’
With an air of reluctance, Mara Niekirk said, ‘Well spotted. It used to be over there.’ She pointed to a spot further along the veranda.
‘Dust it,’ Challis told the crime scene technicians. ‘Dust the alarm box, the front door and the most likely interior surfaces.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Warren Niekirk said. ‘That’ll take hours.’
39
It did take hours. When the Niekirks were alone again and Tayla was somewhere in the house, doing whatever it was that nannies did, Mara Niekirk slapped her husband’s face. ‘Are you out of your tiny mind?’
He screwed up his handsome features in concentration, but the question defeated him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Mister Lord of the Manor, antagonising the cops. Do you want them to suspect us of something?’
‘But you said yourself the Arkley might be a fake,’ said Warren, sulky and aggrieved, ‘and that inspector guy noticed straight off the Klee was missing. What, do you want them poking their noses in?’
Mara closed her eyes, rocking with pain. The Klee. A twenty-first birthday present from Grandfather Krasnov and her most treasured possession. She knuckled away the tears and fed the rage. ‘Wouldn’t normal people want the police to investigate if they’d been burgled? Moron.’
They were in the kitchen, the coffee pot bubbling. Mara had been dying for coffee all morning but no way was she going to make any while the cops were present, obliging her to offer them some. She especially hated the young detective, Murphy. She had that lithe, sporty look Warren liked. I bet she wears a jogging bra and white Bonds, thought Mara. I bet she drinks after-work beers with her male colleagues, and she calls them ‘mate’.
‘Something happened here,’ she continued. ‘There was a break-in. Witnesses, a formal report. The police have to investigate, it’s what they do. And what we do is play the role of victims. But no, you have to antagonise them.’
A gorgeous fuckwit, her husband. It always felt good giving him a tongue-lashing, and God knows she’d done it often enough over the years. Mara’s eyes filled with tears again, pain and rage. Late morning, and she wondered if coffee was going to do the trick. What she needed was a stiff drink.
Thinking about it further, she saw one central reason why the police had made a big deal of the break-in: Warren and his damn plane. He’d tried to play the big shot wheeler-dealer, and where had it got them? Unwelcome attention not only from the Federal Government but now also a local police inspector. Of course the man was going to prick up his ears when he heard the name ‘Niekirk’ again. Otherwise the break-in wouldn’t have attracted much police attention at all.
She scowled at her husband. Be careful what you wish for, she told herself, for the millionth time. She’d wished, five years earlier, for a good-looking hunk to hang on her arm, and that’s exactly what she’d got—but God, the brains of a gnat.
She paused. What had Warren wished for, back when he was courting her? Her family connections, a whiff of the arts? He should have stuck to real estate and sleeping with teenage girls. He had absolutely no eye for quality, only cheap effects. For example, she’d slaved to create a garden that would be visited by tourists, talked about, photographed for the glossy magazines, and did he know the name of a single plant?
‘Sorry, Mar,’ he said now, reading her face.
‘So you should be.’
That fucking plane. Well, the man who’d sold it to them was feeding the sharks off Sydney Heads now. Whispering death indeed— he hadn’t seen or heard a thing, before she conked him on the head.
‘Tell me, Warren, here and now, are there any more cock-ups on the horizon? Any more little surprises for me? Any more messes for me to clean up?’
He flushed. She realised he was standing close to a block of sharp knives, and moderated her tone and manner. ‘You can tell me, sweetheart. Forewarned is forearmed.’
‘Didn’t you notice? We lost more than the Klee.’
She was genuinely puzzled. ‘Like what?’
‘That icon in the walkway.’
She had to think for a moment. She had found it in her grandfather’s effects. Just an old relic, religious nonsense, worm-riddled timber, worth maybe a few hundred dollars, not the kind of thing that interested her one way or the other, but Warren had fallen in love with it. He said it was haunting, beautiful, peaceful—wank words like that.
So she’d hung it where she’d rarely have to see it. ‘No loss.’
A squeaky little voice came from the doorway:
‘Excuse me, Mrs Niekirk.’
‘Oh, what?’ she snarled.
Tayla blanched. ‘Excuse me, but I can’t find Natalia’s inhaler, I think we left it in Sydney.’
‘We?’
‘I. I did. She’s wheezing quite badly.’
Dripping acid, Mara said, ‘Well, why don’t you hunt out the prescription, and get into the car, and drive out onto the road, and point the car towards Waterloo, and go into the chemist, and get a new one? Think you can do that?’
‘Yes, Mrs Niekirk.’
Tayla seemed to evaporate from the doorway rather than scuttle or even walk away. Warren watched her go and Mara wanted to wipe the look off his face. ‘Put your eyes back in your head and your dick back in your pants,’ she said.
The look he shot her was a mix of guilt and triumph. Yes, she’d caught him ogling the nanny again, but why? Because Mara didn’t satisfy him. And never had.
A fly on the wall could watch all this and wonder how I got pregnant, Mara thought, with almost a pang.
Speaking of ogling the nanny…
‘Is the teddy bear cam working?’
He gave her a cruel, concupiscent look. ‘Why? Want to look at Tayla getting her gear off?’
‘I want to look at our burglar, you fool.’
His face cleared. Pennies dropped. ‘Oh, right.’
Horror stories from other married couples had persuaded them to install a teddy bear spy camera in the nursery. How do you know your nanny isn’t a drug addict? What if she’s got a temper and takes it out on the baby? What if she sneaks her boyfriend in to have sex while your baby smothers to death? Hence a pinhole lens concealed as one of the teddy bear’s bead eyes, a digital feed recorded on a hard drive.
The camera worked beautifully—but two things had become apparent to Mara: every nanny they hired was blameless; and her husband liked to watch them undressing on his laptop. Not that Mara minded too much, it kept him occupied. And now it might prove useful in other ways.
She glanced out of the kitchen window. Tayla was bundling Natalia into the car. ‘We’ve got maybe forty minutes.’
‘I’m on it.’
About the only thing he was.
Five minutes later, Mara was jabbing her forefinger at Warren’s laptop screen. ‘Freeze it there.’
Their thief was a young woman dressed in black. They’d watched her scouting around the nursery quickly, offering no clear image of her face, but then, for a brief second, she’d gazed straight at the teddy bear. ‘She was here,’ said Mara, outraged. ‘I recognise her. She rolled up one day last week, wanting to look at the garden. It crossed my mind at the time s
he might be a cop.’ Warren was peering at the image, eyes a little glazed, probably hoping the burglar would start undressing for him. ‘Wakey, wakey.’
He jumped. ‘What?’
‘Can you clean the image up, print out a head-and-shoulders shot?’
‘No problem,’ said Warren, the go-to man when you wanted something practical done.
Mara chewed her lip. ‘How did she find us? Who knew about the Klee? Was it stolen to order?’
‘And the icon.’
‘Forget the icon. It’s got nothing to do with anything. The Klee is another matter. We need to put the word out.’
‘Where?’
‘Where do you think? Not that many places you can move high end art in these parts.’
40
Friday, the light of pre-dawn, Grace waking with a hammering heart.
In her dream, Galt’s little posse of bent coppers had entered her room, surrounded her bed and stared down at her, faceless, remorseless, vigilant.
She scrubbed her cheeks with her hands, swung her feet to the floor and crossed to the window. The motel parking lot was cold and still, the street lights casting a miserable wash over the empty road.
She ran the shower. If Galt came for her—and he would come, she knew him—wouldn’t he come alone? She’d always thought of him as a loner, even as he’d kept the gang close to him. Secretive men, economical; the type attracted to police work because it allowed them to bully and connive. The type that became, if not policemen, criminals. Dictators, union thugs, CEOs…Vigorous men, brawny, cunning, cynical, contemptuous. Heavy drinkers. Divorced, usually. Not well educated but quick and intelligent. The policemen you sometimes saw on the news, towering over their lawyers as they walked free down courthouse steps.
She’d spent a lot of time with such men. Under their gaze, the flat eyes that said they knew things and nothing impressed them. And Grace was nothing, women were nothing.
In the face of that coldness, she’d often found herself hugging and kissing Galt as if to thumb her nose at them.
Galt was like them and he was different from them. A hard, suspicious, sideways looking man. Clever. A killer, she’d thought, from the first time she met him.
She was seventeen years old, living in a Glebe squat. One day she’d lifted $5000 cash, a string of Broome pearls and a Bulgari watch from a Darling Harbour apartment, unaware that it belonged to a call girl who was paying Galt for client referrals and protection. Galt had started hunting Grace the moment he got the phone call. By late afternoon, he’d found her fence. By nightfall, he’d found her.
She’d just burgled some houses in Vaucluse. She had three diamond rings, a drawstring bag of Krugerrands and a couple of grand in cash in her little daypack, and was tossing the pack onto her grungy mattress when he jumped her. The beating was long, clinical, remorseless. He left her face intact but her breasts, ribs, stomach and back were a mess. No more slipping through windows for a while.
A killer. A killer with a wife and three children of whom he never spoke.
And compelling. When she’d fled and he’d found her again, a part of her was ready to yield. ‘Don’t hit me,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t want to hit you,’ he’d said, ‘I’ve come to give you my card.’
Work number, private number, and before long she’d called those numbers. Arrested for loitering at the rear of a Paddington terrace house, she was back on the street within an hour.
She should have kept clear; she should have done the time. But he offered a kind of job security. He had contacts in insurance and burglar alarm companies. He told her who to rob, and when, and where the alarms and cameras were located, and who, if anyone, would be home, and probable police response times and how to evade patrols and roadblocks. He told her what the police were trained to see and expect. All the time he was extending her natural abilities, teaching her to think, anticipate, take pains, assess risks, and hone her body: weight training, aerobics, distance running. Finally, Galt taught her how to pass through life without a trace—no name, no history, no lever that might tip her out into the open.
‘You need me,’ he’d say. ‘You’re the queen of cat burglars but without me you’d be in jail now. I took you off the street, I protect you, I pay your rent. You like the Harbour view, right, Neet? That cute little Audi? Without me you’d have nothing.’
And one day he cocked his head at her and added, ‘Without me you’d be nothing. I was doing some digging: you’re practically invisible, Anita, no past to speak of. Who are you?’
Well, she’d barely known that herself. The only past she had, apart from the orphanage, the foster homes, were the Harbin photograph and a couple of ghost names in her subconscious.
And now, she thought, towelling her hair, I have Galt.
Grace was at Goddard Road before dawn. Any later, there’d be farmers getting an early start on the day, the newspaper delivery guy, shire workers, local residents walking the dog.
Driving the WreckRent Camry, she steered by her side lights to the Niekirks’ driveway entrance, raising only a little dust. Nothing there to indicate that the property had been a crime scene. Reaching the culvert, she pulled over, motor running, and got out. She stretched the kinks in her spine, checking both ways for the gleam of approaching headlights. Only stillness and the murkiness of another predawn, as the sun waxed and the moon waned.
She darted into the ditch, her fingers masking the lens of a tiny torch, and found the waterproof sack. Ten seconds later, she was behind the wheel again, driving straight ahead to Balnarring Road, which she took to Frankston-Flinders Road, turning left and looping up through Waterloo and finally back to her motel.
Here she showered, changed into jeans and a T-shirt and found a café for breakfast. Then she checked out, returned to Waterloo and entered the VineTrust bank. The sooner she had Felsen in der Blumenbeet stowed away in her safe-deposit box, the better.
Not the icon. It was a part of her and she took it home.
Steven Finch knew he’d been a little sloppy, allowing the Fed to surprise him like that. So he was alert that Friday, watching his security monitors, and saw Mara and Warren Niekirk park their BMW, get out, look both ways along the street and enter the shop— Mara the witch wearing a spring dress, fair hair loose around her shoulders, legs bare. Not that Finch was fooled; grew tense, in fact. As for the Ken-doll husband, he just trailed behind Mara looking stupid.
‘Mara. Warren.’
‘Steven Finch, Esquire,’ said Mara breezily, and his insides curdled a little more.
His mind flashed back through their recent encounters. He’d once offered them a dicey Dickerson, not knowing it was a fake. No money had changed hands and they’d accepted that he’d acted in good faith and continued to do business with him. But Mara’s wrath had been pretty impressive.
‘Everything okay?’ he asked, matching her breeziness.
He wished he could say, oh by the way, he happened to have a Nolan for them, a Blackman, even a Central Australian dot painting, anything to ease the tension. But it wasn’t as if he bought and sold art works every day.
‘No, Steven, everything is not okay.’
Mara was wearing dark glasses. Finch wished she’d take them off. Something was wrong but without seeing her eyes he couldn’t gauge how wrong. ‘Sorry to hear it,’ he said inadequately.
Mara slapped a photograph onto the counter. A4 size, a little grainy, but clearly Suze, face on, all in black, doing what she did best, he was guessing.
He glanced expressionlessly at the photo, tilted his head this way and that, looked up with a questioning look. ‘Who is it? Is it your place?’ he asked. Thinking, Suze, what the fuck have you done?
‘It is indeed our place, and we thought you might know who this person is,’ Mara said, tapping with a hooked fingernail.
The goods for sale on Finch’s shop floor seemed closer suddenly, darker. ‘Sorry, never seen her before.’
Mara stood back from the counter and regarded him with a scary
smile. ‘We have done business in the past, Steven. Correct?’
His mouth was dry. ‘Correct.’
‘Paintings, drawings?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ve never asked you where these items come from, and you have never asked us what we’ve done with them, correct?’
‘That’s how it works,’ Finch agreed.
‘So you probably think our walls are dripping with art works.’
Finch didn’t like where this was going. ‘Never thought about it.’
And that was no lie, but tell her that.
‘Really, Steve? Never wondered idly what treasures we might have at home? Thought to yourself, I hope their security is adequate for all those valuable paintings they have hanging on their walls.’
Deciding not to be bullied, Finch said, ‘Mara, spit it out.’
‘This … person,’ said Mara Niekirk, ‘broke into my home on Wednesday night and stole two items from me. Both had sentimental value, but one also had a very high dollar value.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
‘You don’t know her?’
‘Sorry, no.’
‘But you do know people like her? They bring you things: TV sets, iPods, cameras, the odd Albert Tucker painting?’
‘Yes, but—’
Warren Niekirk, looking left out, spoke up. ‘Look Steve old son, all we’re asking is, if this chick comes into the shop wanting to sell you a Russian icon or a little Klee painting, let us know, all right? We’ll take it from there.’
His wife’s dark glasses flashed but he forged on. ‘We want both items back, no questions asked, okay, Steve?’
‘Sure,’ said Finch, thinking that Mara had something other than no-questions-asked in mind. ‘But I can’t think why she’d come to me.’
I can’t think why she robbed a house in her own back yard, he thought. He also thought he’d better act quickly if he was going to make any money out of the situation. Get to Suze before anyone else did.
‘Can I keep this?’ he asked, lifting the photograph from the counter top.
